MLK

January 16, 2006

Greetings from the march,

My friend and I stood in the dark outside the gas station and wondered where we would spend the night.

It was 1977, the middle of June, and as muggy and buggy as it can get in Mississippi in the summer.  For more than a week we’d been beyond the Mason Dixon, bicycling through a series of small towns, each mile bringing us further south and further back in time.  Further into a place of great hospitality, culture, history and great despair and injustice.

I remember feeling afraid, as if I were witnessing a wrong I should report to someone.  I heard Black men, old enough to be my father, called ‘boy’, saw Blacks step off the sidewalk to let White people pass, heard the word ‘nigger’ casually peppered in nearly every sentence.  It was an uncomfortable place to be, an American in America, and feeling like some alien visitor. In 1977, not 1957.

Small towns in Mississippi were cut from the same pattern.  A half dozen shops, a few houses along the main street, a few church steeples.  Smaller houses, some shacks, dotted the side streets.  There would be some city office, or city hall, sometimes with its own steeple.  Benches or chairs arranged in front of wherever men would collect and talk in shade.  The barber shop, the hardware store, the police station.

We stayed in roadside parks, or wherever people would have us; one night in a house on stilts in a swamp, the next night a farmer’s barn, another night in a luxurious home, guest of a wealthy lawyer.

This night we had arrived too late in the town to find a place to stay.  We considered the town park near the tracks on the edge of town, until we were urged along by the local police.  We coasted into the little town on our bikes, hoping to see a friendly face and make a connection.

We struck up a conversation with a group of guys hanging out at the gas station, hoping that by the time they closed we would be able to drop our sleeping bags behind the building.  It was not an ideal location, but hidden enough from the local cops to avoid being rousted.

Clyde was the eldest of the group.  The rest of them were young boys, none older than 15.  They were curious about us, wondered where we’d come from, where we were headed why we were traveling as we were.  It was a conversation I’d had a hundred times.

It was a neutral moment, one without the burden of race or class to slow it down.  If they were uncomfortable with our being White they did not show it.  We talked and laughed and one by one set aside the barriers that strangers carry.

When enough time had passed I asked Clyde if it would be all right for us to spend the night behind the gas station, promising to be gone in the morning and to leave no mess.  I asked politely, giving the man the deference he was due, hoping he would help us.

Clyde was quiet then, but just as politely told me no.  It was not his gas station, and he could not give that kind of permission.  He was embarrassed and I didn’t press it further.

Now it was very late, and dark, and I was not looking forward to pedaling out of town to try to find safe place to sleep.  I turned to one of the boys we had been talking with, an enthusiastic kid who had a million questions about traveling.

His eyes grew big.  I knew that he could spend all night asking us about our adventures,

He agreed to have us stay at his house, and ran home to tell his parents.  He wasn’t gone long. 

“They said ‘no’.” he said once he caught his breath.  He did not look at me.

I could not let it go, we needed him.  “We won’t be any trouble and we’ll be gone early.  Maybe if I talked to them...” I tried.

The boy hesitated. 

I could understand his parent’s caution, undoubtedly wondering why their son would bring home strangers at ten o’clock at night, asking if they could sleep in his back yard.  It would throw some people.  I’d had that conversation a few times too, and many times charmed my way into a place to stay and a bite to eat.  But now I sensed a new thing.

Just to the south of us civil rights workers were murdered while trying to help Blacks register to vote, not even a year from the time Dr. King gave his “I have a dream” speech.  In the thirteen years that followed there were protest marches and rallies and more violence.  The roads north and south were lined with places where the civil rights war was being fought in Mississippi.   Blacks and Whites still walked a different walk here.  Being charming and earnest was not going to make a dent in that culture.

In the moment I waited for the young man to answer me, I felt the weight of our history, clinging like the humid air around us.  The moment dragged on and finally he said;  “No, my parents won’t let you stay with us.”  The look in his eyes told me that the neutral moment had passed.  The look told me that he’d been reminded about our differences, and he’d resigned himself to that.  In the weeks that followed I saw this look more than once.

I like to think that the last thirty or so years has made a difference in those small towns.  I am afraid to look too closely to find that it has not.  I like to think there has been a difference in me, and that I have made some difference.

None of us are free from the burden of racism and it’s prejudicial cousins.  You’re too Amish, too Muslim, too Irish, too Indian, too African, too different.  I don’t know you yet so let me judge you, fear you, hate you, by what I think I know about ‘your kind’. 

We are also burdened by what we allow.  Some stand up and make changes and take chances, but we are not all so courageous. 

They say that the hope is in our children, that each generation is more colorblind than the last.  My prayer for today, as we remember one of the courageous ones, is that I will be an instrument that makes that future a certainty, and that my children will not see the just the differences in others, but the beauty that common in all of us.

Hope this finds you dreaming,

David

Copyright © 2006 David Smith

“Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”

Taken from Dr. Martin Luther King’s  ‘Dream’ speech given in Washington, D.C. 1963